healing the many layers

I could never fully understand why healing is such a hard and painful process and just how much hope and patience it takes.

I could never understand why just when I start to feel good, or something shifts for the good, that its “then” it begins to get harder and more painful.

I’ll be honest when I say that there have been times I wanted to give up; times I felt there was no more hope to hold onto.. but over the past year or so I have learned some things.

I have learned that healing is much like the layers of an onion – the more you peel, the deeper you go into the wounds of the past, and in those layers holds more understanding.

I heard a podcast the other day of this woman who talked about how emotional healing is much like peeling the layers of an onion – and it makes so much sense!

Being in therapy now for almost 7 years I can see how my healing has been like a process of layers, and each layer is more painful than the last. Things I talked about years and years ago are more painful to talk about now, than it was back then because I have gone deeper into the knowing.

I think my mind-set for years has been about the hope of feeling better each day I go to therapy, but never did I think that maybe the process is about “breaking down” before I can “build myself up” and how each layer that gets harder to peel, is about the deeper wounds that are there being exposed.

I have gone through many many layers, and right now I am going through some of the hardest and sometimes painful and confusing.

We look at healing sometimes as a process going from bad to good , but truthfully the process is about going from bad to worse before it gets better.

There were days I left a session feeling worse than I did going in. Each layer that is peeled back is getting me closer and closer to the core of the pain from my childhood, and in order to get to the core, I need to peel each layer and honor each piece as a part of who I am.

Each layer that is peeled back is another layer of hurt and pain. It’s another part of me I never saw before. There are also many layers that look the same. One part of my story may look the same, but feels different on a different level.

There are many parts of my journey that I wasn’t ready to face before that I may be ready to face now because I got stronger and I healed by each layer I pulled back from the last.

Being abused as a child, that child inside of me got stuck and she is the core of the onion while I moved on to the adult, but the child stayed behind holding all that pain, grief, shame, anger, betrayal, and all those emotional layers being furthest away from who I really am, and my job today in this healing process is to peel back those layers to get to the child who is stuck and needs to be free from the pain she has held her whole life.

In order to get to the core, healing needs to be done with each layer and those layers can be very very painful at times, and sometimes those layers take time and patience.

There are times when I get to a layer that gives me a place to rest and reflect, but its important to not let that isolate me or to stay in that place too long, it’s important to keep going – to keep pulling back the layers no matter how painful it can get.

I am beginning to understand the process of my healing more and more and a part of that understanding came in the process of peeling the layers of my healing.

it’s exciting and scary at the same time. Because each layer you pull back – you are being seen more and more to the person you are and the person you are meant to be.